Designers and manufacturers of printing devices need to be able to evaluate the quality of text and graphics printed by the printing devices. In the past, designers and manufacturers of printing devices have relied on visual assessment of the quality of printed text and graphics as well as on a number of standard measurements of printed-text quality. However, visual-inspection-based assessment of printing quality may be quite subjective, and, when a large number of printing-quality assessments need to be made, can be tedious, expensive, error prone, and exhibit high variation. Unfortunately, many of the standard metrics currently applied to evaluate the quality of printing do not closely correspond to human assessment of print quality based on visual inspection of printed materials, and may often be quite scale dependent, as well as dependent on the particular text and graphics used for assessing printing quality, background colors and shades on which the text and graphics are printed, and other such parameters and characteristics. For this reason, developers and manufacturers of printing devices and other character-rendering devices, including display devices, as well as vendors, retailers, and, ultimately, users of printing devices and other text-rendering devices may all have need for deterministic, reliable, and automatable character-rendering-quality measurement methods that are relatively independent of scale of the rendered text and graphics, background colors and shades, and other such parameters and characteristics.